


these twisting threads

by cactuslesbian



Series: the ties that bind [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Siblings, Body Horror, Canon-Typical The Web Content (The Magnus Archives), Coming of Age, Family Dynamics, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Canon, Spiders, Web Avatar Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, its the theatre kid of it all, jon and annabelle raised as siblings, like just a fuckton of spiders, no beta we get pipe murdered like jurgen, the mother of puppet's c- parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 15:47:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30007206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cactuslesbian/pseuds/cactuslesbian
Summary: He’s a slower learner than she is; he’s not nearly as good as pulling the strings as her, ( Mother had praised her as a natural weaver, commenting on her innate talent and making the girl all but glow with pride. Jon has a tendency to hold the threads too tightly or too loosely and they will tangle. ) but Annabelle helps Jon regardless and can feel their Mother’s contentment like a gentle thrumming in their bones. The lessons are hard, but they learn. The both of them learn.or like. sometimes a family can be an eldritch horror based in manipulation & two haunted ass kids that she stole. aka the Jon and Annabelle as sibling fic that was not asked for but is Here
Relationships: Annabelle Cane & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: the ties that bind [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2207370
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	these twisting threads

**Author's Note:**

> okay this idea has been pingponging around my head for a while tbh and ep 197 was just that last push I needed lmao.

_[ JANUARY 1995 ]_

It takes Delores Sims nearly six hours to realize that her grandson is missing. She’d left him with a stack of secondhand books and a stern comment about him behaving while she brought the neighbor’s a meal; she’d only been gone twenty minutes. Jonathan isn’t in the living room when she gets back, but the stack of books remain and she simply assumes one has caught his interest and he’s elected to read it out in the garden, after all, it’s a lovely day and she’s always telling him that he could use more fresh air.

When the sun begins to set low over the horizon in Bournemouth and Jon hasn’t wandered back into the house for dinner, Delores opens the back door and as her eyes sweep the garden she realizes he’s nowhere to be found. She doesn’t worry, not at first; Jon wanders. The neighbors know to return him home, the handful of police she’s familiar with know his face and will bring him back.

But soon the sky goes from golden to scarlet to a deep and inky blue and there is still no sign of him. Delores calls the neighbors and none of them have seen him. She tries the police next and they ask if she’d like to report him missing. 

By the next morning Delores has given her statement to the police and investigators over and over and she sits hunched at the kitchen table with a cigarette that she’d never have let herself smoke if Jon were in the house and the police continue to placate her with half-hearted assertions that they’ll find him, he’s probably just run away, he’s probably fine.

But they never do find Jonathan Sims.

  
  


\----

  
  


The Cane family notices Annabelle’s disappearance the day after the fact when the school phones Jean at work who then phones her third oldest child and asks her to investigate. Lucille looks and frets and searches but Annabelle is nowhere to be found within the house or her usual “secret” hiding spots.

Lucille then enlists the help of Jason; he’s a year and a half her junior, but he’s already taller than she is and on the track team to boot. He’s as good a bet as any for finding Annabelle as quickly and safely as possible. How many times has she been told not to wander off?

By the time her older brother and sister make their way to inspect an abandoned chip shop, it’s deserted save for the cobwebs that billow gently in the evening breeze. They do, however, find Annabelle’s little bumblebee rucksack and one of the colorful bobbles Lucile arranged her hair in the previous morning. Lucille feels sick and demands Jason call the police in a voice that’s tight and shrill with panic as her knuckles pale against the sunshiney yellow fabric of Annabelle’s bag. Jason, who’s wide-eyed and putting the pieces together, runs off toward the closest operating shop to borrow their phone.

Lucille has to give the police her photograph of Annabelle. It was taken for school, her little sister staring at the camera with what Lucille had teasingly called a Mona Lisa smile, not wanting to show the gap where her two front teeth had been a few months back, called it undignified ( _far too serious for an eight year old,_ Lucille had always thought to herself). It’s the most recent picture they have of Annabelle. 

Lucille is the one who holds Annette, who’s also only eight years old and asking in her high and curious voice about where her twin has run off too. If they’ll see her again. Lucille assures her that they will.

But no one ever finds Annabelle Cane either.

* * *

  
  


They are afraid of the spiders at first, the little crawling things that infest the old house they’re in so thoroughly that the walls seem to ripple with them. They are afraid of the voice that whispers in their heads and calls itself their Mother- even though Jon’s mother is dead and Annabelles doesn’t particularly care; besides, neither woman had sounded like the scrape of metal on stone. 

Annabelle and Jon hold onto each other tightly and wordlessly that first night. Despite the terror that’s permeated into their very bones, the presence of the other settles something within them. Besides, it would seem that fear, like misery, does love company.

  
  


* * *

The spiders never really go away. There are times when there are fewer of them, certainly, but the sound of many legs and skittering whispering voices never stops.

“ I’m Annabelle. ” the girl whispers eventually in a voice that’s shaky with fear and the exhaustion of someone who’s been screaming.

“ I’m Jon. ” the boy whispers back, his voice just as tentative and raw. 

They’re gripping each other’s hands so hard that it hurts but they can’t think to let go of each other. There’s a silent fear that hangs in the air between the two of them that leads them to believe that if they go untethered for even a moment, the spiders will carry one or both of them away. So they anchor each other in place and the spiders carefully part around them.

In the end, they cannot say how long they have sat huddled together and afraid; when the fear of the spiders turns to resignation and then acceptance or when they first begin to see the fine spider silk threads interweaving the world and each other. When they actually begin to listen to what their Mother has been whispering and begin to do as she asks.

* * *

He’s a slower learner than she is; he’s not nearly as good as pulling the strings as her, ( Mother had praised her as a natural weaver, commenting on her innate talent and making the girl all but glow with pride. Jon has a tendency to hold the threads too tightly or too loosely and they will tangle. He is trying ) but Annabelle helps Jon regardless and can feel their Mother’s contentment like a gentle thrumming in their bones. The lessons are hard, but they learn. The both of them learn. 

She’s not a patient thing, their Mother, nor a comforting thing. Not even a safe thing, really; even to them. But she whispers and promises and assures the both of them that they are important to the world she’s bringing about brick by brick.

It’s nice, they think, even when it hurts, to be wanted.

* * *

[ JANUARY 1996 ]

When they leave the house, they still look and act like the children they are, but something around them has shifted; there is a gravity there that simply wasn’t before, a knowing in both of their wide, dark eyes.

There are two adults who will sign forms and buy groceries and sit at a respectable distance when Jon and Annabelle play or hunt or weave, they call themselves their parents and no one thinks to question it. It’s their Mother’s doing, they know, and they trust in her judgement, even when the pair of them stand stock still at night and a spider or two will scuttle out from their ear or their nose or their mouth and dart across their face or their wide and glassy eyes. 

They serve their purpose well enough. And when the parents eventually fall apart, they’re easy enough to replace.

* * *

Jon and Annabelle continue to grow into their newfound powers and themselves. Homeschooling, or at least the workbooks the not-parents will leave, holds their attention most of the time and they have each other to lean on. They are special, the two of them, and they know it. That in and of itself is enough for them to not regret the lives they’ve left behind or could have had if they’d stayed.

But still, sometimes they have to wonder what’s happened to the people they’ve left behind. They’ve seen the missing person pictures from Hunstanton and Bournemouth, the pictures of the children they know in an abstract sort of way are _them_ but can no longer truly recognize in a way that matters. 

They watch the news on an old TV that crackles and pops with static and see Annabelle’s mother’s teary pleas for her safe return, that an older boy from Jon’s neighborhood has been brought in for questioning with regards to his disappearance and everyone is saying he did _something_ to him. 

Annabelle rests with her head on Jon’s lap and softly informs that her mother probably hadn’t even noticed her absence until Lucille pointed it out. Jon will run his fingers over the smooth silk of the bonnet Annabelle sleeps in and admit that the older boy had made his life hell since he moved in with his grandmother and some part of him is glad in a vicious sort of way that he’s being blamed for what the police are now calling a murder. 

Jon learns about Lucille and Jason and the older siblings Annabelle has off attending uni, her twin Annette, and little Desmond, who everyone simply referred to as “the baby”. She swears that she doesn’t miss them, but Jon has seen her looking at the yellow hair bobbles from those first days they spent huddled in the dark, even if she no longer wears them.

Annabelle listens as Jon talks about his grandmother and how he sometimes feels as though she looks at him but doesn’t see him. He tells her about the mother who he misses to this day. How she’d read to him, all sorts of things, every night. That she called him her little starlight.

( They both know they’re better off with the spiders and their new Mother. They know this. She whispers to them about the smoldering ashes of wasted potential that would result from staying and festering with their families. That they are special and their families simply weren’t good enough to foster that specialness even if they were aware enough to want to. )

( it doesn’t mean that sometimes Annabelle won’t tell him about how she thinks her other brothers and sisters would have liked him and protected him the way they protected her. It doesn’t mean that Jon has stopped writing letters to his grandmother full of explanations and apologies that he will never send and Annabelle pretends she doesn’t see. )

They and their dangerous, hiding Mother are all the family they need. 

Annabelle will ride the bus with Jon to the library and the bookstores and let him read aloud and ramble about the things he’s learned and Jon has slipped off to a braiding shop on a handful of occasions and learned how to style Annabelle’s hair in pretty twists the way she likes. 

The two of them will often do impromptu plays that they write themselves and perform for an audience of stuffed animals and spiders and they are as happy as they can be. 

* * *

  
  


It’s Annabelle who wants to go to secondary school and Jon hesitates. Annabelle has always been the courage between the two of them; the one who knows what she’s doing and has the confidence to see it through. Jon, admires her as much as he envies her for that.

“ they won’t pick on you, ” she assures him as they lie curled under Jon's duvet. They’ve had their own beds for a while now, but every now and again Annabelle will crawl under the covers with him. “ we can pull the threads if they try. Just a little. It won’t be like before. You protect me and I protect you, even if they’re just ordinary boring kids. ”

Jon knows she’s right, he does, but he’s never been good at school. At connecting with other children who aren’t Annabelle and their Mother has no input on the matter. 

Annabelle is his reason for going in the end. Even if he were willing to make her go to school by herself ( and he isn’t ) he can’t stand to not be around her for too long. 

She’s right in the end, of course. The two of them even make friends aside from each other, even if they never attend or host playdates and sleepovers. They will often tell each other odd little inside jokes that make the other children and even teachers nervous. 

And the years pass like that. Annabelle and Jon becoming gangly teenagers and eventually dismissing the spider-filled husks that pass in public for their parents. When people ask, they will simply look off in a sad sort of way and say that they are orphans and that's usually enough for people to simply not ask anymore.

Attending Oxford when they’re both old enough is simple and comfortable and their Mother has no qualms with it. They are as content as things like them can be.

**Author's Note:**

> i fully intend to write 2+ follow ups to this but cannot gauge for time as work has been a Lot as of late. The follow ups will follow Annabelle and Jon into adulthood and the respective plans the web has for them and ways in which they Struggle with said plan. 
> 
> Like who would win a primordial eldritch monstrosity that's the embodiment of manipulation or the power of love??
> 
> dabs
> 
> anyway I'm on tumblr @ smallandknowingdyke


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